Nokia to turn mobile landscape on its head with ‘Meltemi’ smartphone OS

Nokia is again developing a proprietary smartphone operating system after announcing this past February that it would abandon both Symbian and MeeGo in favor of Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform. Citing multiple anonymous sources, The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday reported that Nokia’s executive vice president of mobile phones, Mary McDowell, is heading up the project. Code-named “Meltemi,” the new mobile platform is reportedly Linux-based and it is intended for use on low-end smartphones. BGR has independently confirmed the report, and we have learned additional details that paint an exciting new picture of the mobile industry should Nokia’s new OS realize its potential.

Updated with statement from Nokia.

The big question mark that the Journal’s report doesn’t address is what Meltemi — the Greek name for winds across the Aegean Sea from the north in the summer — means for Nokia’s plans with Windows Phone. Nokia’s chief executive Stephen Elop confirmed on multiple occasions that the company plans to offer Microsoft’s new mobile OS on high-end and low-end devices, thus continuing its efforts across all markets.

While the development of a new proprietary operating system has obvious implications for Windows Phone in emerging markets, BGR has learned that Nokia’s plans likely haven’t changed much since the Meltemi project began. Nokia still intends to offer a range of smartphones powered by Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system, and this range includes entry-level, mid-range and high-end smartphones.

Meltemi, a source has informed BGR, is being built to eventually replace Nokia’s Series 40 platform, which currently powers the company’s feature phones. Nokia’s vision is seemingly to build an operating system with capability that reaches well beyond “S40,” but that can function on similar low-cost hardware. This new platform will be fairly capable, but our understanding is that it will not be a full-fledged OS intended to compete with the likes of Android, iOS and Windows Phone.

Nokia will build low-cost Windows Phones to address certain demographics, but Meltemi will allow the cell phone vendor to bring smartphone functionality to emerging markets at rock-bottom prices. The licensing fees, hardware requirements and other costs tied to Windows Phone, we’re told, would never allow Nokia to hit the price points it will achieve with Meltemi — not even with Microsoft’s upcoming stripped down version of Windows Phone dubbed “Tango.”

Nokia is the world’s top cell phone vendor by volume, having sold 461 million mobile phones in 2010 according to recent data from market research firm Gartner. A world where nearly all of those devices are smartphones would see countless new doors open for Nokia and for its hundreds of millions of customers.

While we don’t comment on future products or technologies, I can say that our Mobile Phones team has a number of exciting projects in the works that will help connect the next billion consumers to the Internet. When it comes to smartphones, as we have said repeatedly, Windows Phone is our smartphone platform of choice. We are confident in our efforts to build a joint ecosystem with Microsoft, and we are aggressively executing that strategy with operators, retailers, developers and other stakeholders.

Another day, another Linux-based phone OS. I’ll believe it when I can buy actual hardware running the OS.

Anonymous

The story is that Stephen Elop can’t fire all the MeeGo engineers at once even if he tried. He’s not a god at Nokia. So they wind down MeeGo development and shift some of those engineers to their S40 evolution called Meltemi, which is supposedly based on the Linux kernel, with Swipe UI, and Qt application development model. Sounds familiar, I know.

This is what Stephen Elop meant when he said that the innovations we see in the N9 will live on at Nokia. Apparently, MeeGo as envisioned by Intel, had too rigid of a spec for Nokia to differentiate their products sufficiently. So Nokia said FU to Intel, resuscitated Maemo 6 Harmattan, and made the N9, calling it API-compatible with MeeGo, not MeeGo-proper. And then Stephen Elop switched to Windows Phone 7 ManGo.

Now remember, Elop is a ‘softie. What he’ll end up doing is dump Meltemi when it is almost ready, because Windows Phone 7 TanGo will also be ready in the same timeframe, just to say FU to the Linux and open source folks, not once, but twice, once with MeeGo, then again with Meltemi.

[ See the pattern? MeeGo > ManGo > TanGo ]

Anonymous

dammit!

Now you got me singing a Ted Nugent song in my head!

Wango Tango! ….wang-go tang-go!

Quintus Murray

here is an idea NO ONE FUCKIN WANTS FEATURE PHONES GET THAT THROUGH UR THICK SKULLS SERIOUSLY STOP STOP NOW

Zach even writes that it isn’t intended to compete with any of the other OS’s

wtf!!!

Mojo Dojo

Are you serious? No, really, Like for-real serious?

Nokia sells half a billion cell phones every year. Imagine they were all smartphones. Imagine even the poorest of the poor in third-world countries had access to smartphones and the knowledge that can be gained through constant internet access.That doesn’t just turn the mobile landscape on its head, it turns the world on its head.

BBA Brian

Are you serious? No, really, like for-real serious?

Nokia has been in that position for YEARS already before this with various other OS’s

If you are going to be outraged please be outraged with a layer of base knowledge!

Mojo Dojo

Wow. You genuinely don’t get it. You’re so very wrong. A barebones, dirt cheap OS with true smart capabilities and a massive ecosystem (when Nokia gets ready to sell hundreds of millions of these things in year-one, the ecosystem will follow almost instantaneously) will change the lives of millions upon millions of people in developing countries forever.

Art

Damn, he shut your stupid trolling ass up…

http://twitter.com/Aleis Jayrock

they`ll have an ecosystem being built from the ground up with lil to no apps….android is out now.
DONE.

Anonymous

If you haven’t noticed the devices will support QT which will and has plenty of apps available. Many developers are making more money on Nokia’s Ovi store than on Android Marketplace. If there are hundreds of millions of connected devices in the wild there will be plenty of apps available.

Anonymous

I don’t get it. Who did you reply to?

http://www.tablazines.com Tablazines

..and we’re supposed to believe you this time, why exactly?

Anonymous

In theory, Nokia could kill of dumbphones altogether by making sure that even dumbphones are actually pretty smart.

I think this might be pretty awesome, if they can actually stick to it and not just arbitrarily quit on it.

TFausett

Who’s running that place over there? Just choose something and go with.

quintus murray

they are run by monkeys

http://twitter.com/Aleis Jayrock

These guys just dont learn.

Anonymous

*shrug*, really Nokia?

Coppakosh

when i read the headline, i thought that what meego would have done, and it still can if nokia had put some effort and support behind it. Then i read on. Windows phone cannot work on low end devices because of the 1ghz requirement and am sure tango will require the same specs. I hope this works for them, and they don’t give it the same treatment as meego.

http://twitter.com/MattSTKC MattSTKC

seriously, what is Nokia smoking? Dump all your recognizable and decent OS’s, adopt Windows Phone 7 and you don’t even have devices out for it yet and then start creating another random BS OS?

thx 1138

” then start creating another random BS OS?”

UM .. poke poke…

“Random” ? because they’ve already developed this OS and have been shipping it for years?

So let’s see, Nokia has been shipping phones with Linux on them for 3 years already. Models , N900, and N9 (The N8 has had it running internally for years as well.)

“BS” ? BS as in not a real OS, or a deficient OS? Well, the linux kernel has almost 40 years of design history behind it,* plus more enhanced and more rapid development for the last 20 years. :-) E.g. the entire history of Linux development. :-) Since the kernel supports almost all of the extended functionality that any modern operating system can have, there is very little the kernel can’t do. There are many operating systems for embedded devices running around that are much less capable. For example many of them cannot run more than one application at a time. My AT&T 3B1, sporting a huge 2 MB of RAM, purchased in, 1986? (I think?) Had the ability to do everything you would want in a cell phone, and a great deal more besides. Ironically, the user interface, which was curses-based, felt like it ran faster than either of the WinXP system or the 2 Linux systems here in front of me.

There is definitely something to be said for minimizing the bells and whistles of a GUI. :-)
So, “BS” ? yup, there’s definitely some of that around here. Smells fresh too. :-) (boy, that’s a straight line. I can already see the responses coming… )

Despite the development/license agreement with Microsoft to put WinCE on their phones, Nokia
So let’s see, Nokia has been shipping phones with Linux on them for 3 years already. Model number N-9, N-8, N-900″BS” ? yup, there’s definitely some of that around here. Smells fresh too. Nokia will have a terribly difficult time getting the internal culture of their development teams to drop Linux. The reason for that is twofold. The 1st reason is that the 1st set of system APIs any developer learns is the 1st set they feel comfortable with and so there is resistance to picking up another one that’s extremely different from the 1st. And the feel of the Windows APIs vs. the UNIX/Linux APIs is very very different.The 2nd reason, and by far, the stronger reason is the difference in the API design. The design of the APIs come from 2 very different directions. The sets of interfaces used to access the Window’s systems facilities have a raw feel to them, the number of calls and the wide ranging differences in the parameters gives the interfaces a feel of being unfinished. And if that is the case, it is hardly the Window’s developers fault. They did not have the luxury of time available to them as the UNIX/Linux developers did. Considering they had to get the first version of Windows out in less than 2 years, and then of course they were stuck. Once you make a commercial release of an API, and you have to follow a managerial edict of total backwards compatibility, you are stuck with the 1st thing you published and changing it or revising it to make the design more minimal/elegant is impossible. The feel of the UNIX APIs is initially that they don’t provide enough functionality, but after using them for a while you begin to appreciate the amount of effort that went into their design. Despite appearing simple and minimal, the UNIX APIs deliver access to full functionality of the system facilities through a simple interface that is much faster to learn . It takes a great deal more effort to make all of the system capabilities available through a simple API than it does to make them available through a complex API. In a way it is fortunate that the early UNIX developers had such limited hardware resources. If they had had the much more capable and powerful modern hardware available they might not have worked so hard to figure out how to force all the system capabilities to be accessible through such a small interface.X Windows was not a UNIX design and so it feels quite different from the UNIX APIs. X Windows was originally W Windows and was designed to be a cross-platform GUI, intended to run on every computing platform made. And in the engineering/academic/scientific research world it largely was. X Windows ran on Vax systems, any one of a dozen or so proprietary workstation platforms that existed in the pre-UNIX consolidation era, several mini-computer systems, (PR1ME systems for example), not to mention the standalone dedicated GUI terminals, called “X terminals”. X terminals allowed multiple users to have GUI-based workstations, that appeared to behave just like each user had an entire computing system to themselves, but the application would be running on a computer somewhere else. So several users could share a single high-powered workstation and still have a good graphical user experience because all the screen updating and graphical work was offloaded to the X terminal. As a further bit of flexibility, because X Windows was designed from the ground up to be a networked protocol, any user with the next terminals could access any computing system that could be reached over the network(s) which was ideal for research work. Any engineer or scientist with an X terminal could access and use any computer available throughout the world, interacting with, and viewing the results of an application running halfway across the planet right on their desktop as if the application were running locally.Today, running Windows applications remotely is possible as well, but the protocol used was glued on afterward and is only directly usable from the Windows platform. Other facilities, such as VNC or “No Machine”, aka NXMachine are glued on top of that, further still from the actual GUI API. Each layer causing it to consume more resources.It’s probably time for the X Windows body to get together with the MS Windows body and collectively create one coherent, and natively networkable, GUI API. Of course that will break the rule of backwards compatibility that has been set in stone for Microsoft for so long. However given that Microsoft’s current marketplace outlook is that of a distinct waning Microsoft may be more open to the idea than in past years.
* ( the initial Linux kernel design** tried to copy the AT&T/BSD UNIX internals, and took a number of releases while to complete. The Linux devs started peeing in the soup, er I mean “enhancing it” ;-) before they finished cloning the design

** ( The initial Linux kernel functionality was copied as closely as possible from*** AT&T’s original UNIX, and bits of BSD, which was a source code fork of AT&T’s UNIX. The first bits of UNIX code were written in 1970/1971 start of Linux ‘virtual clone forking’ ==> Linux today at approx 20 years old == approximately 40 years of design history.****
*** (Although the design of the Linux kernel was a logic design copy, none of the code was. Operating System design books about Minix, and XINU, as well as the annotated internals design notes exposition published by Lyons were all sources of UNIX kernel design information available at that time.)

**** some argue that the MULTICS OS design work could also be included, which would make the design even older, but who wants that? :-)

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_HK7ALWU4PMZC7SUZ4NZLXDT6R4 Chad

Put Windows Phone on that new Nokia N9 and I’d be willing to give it a shot. coming from an Android guy

Anonymous

Why on Earth would you want to do that? Honestly MeeGo Harmattan is much better than WP. You should try it at least to know how it works.

Drew

Nokia, fcuk you… You’re the mobile world’s little ADDH kid who has no clue of what he wants to be when he grows up. I’m thoroughly convinced you have absolutely no idea what you’re doing in the mobile space. You sold out all of the brilliance at Nokia to a portly bald man who was selling you dreams… Thanks for my N900 though… but not really. The Maemo (dot) org community deserves all of the credit.

Flmsxs

Why cannot you guys think that is only a simplified meego/maemo based on they have done. too stupid

Anonymous

Thats pretty interesting dude, cant help but wonder what they are thinking on that one.
web-privacy.eu.tc

http://www.ecigator.com/ Electronic Cigarette

Nokia? oh yeah, i remember them. That was my first cellphone back in 1999 before i started buying stuff that was better.

http://profiles.google.com/alfielee Rex Alfie Lee

I love the fact that Nokia is building a proprietary OS based on Linux. I thought actually using Linux meant that they had to offer it up for all to see the source & allow the updating & improvement. It’ll probably be crap because Nokia’s last effort with MeeGo wasn’t even good enough for themselves. I’ll never buy another Nokia again.